Posts filed under 'wiki'
Despite my previous post claiming that my thoughts are now with research rather than computers, my attention today was briefly distracted by some posts on an interesting blog I am subscribed to. Mark Russinovich has is transferring his old blog to a new blog on Microsoft’s servers now that he has been hired by that company. He is one of the founders of Sysinternals, an interesting company that produces tools to help manage a computer with Windows installed. I often use their software when I’m on a Windows computer, for example to figure out which programs are run on boot time. His blog is very interesting to read, often containing detective stories on Windows systems. It’s also nice to read a geek-style blog by a fan of Windows systems, as a counter balance to all the anti-Microsoft stuff I read for example on Slashdot. After all, despite the fact that Microsoft’s marketing and market penetration strategies are disgusting, their software is actually quite good and of course ubiquitous. An interesting thing I read today on his blog is about personal computer security. Most people run as ‘administrator’ on their system, because it makes installing software so much easier. It also means, however, that if you get spyware or virusses via email or web surfing, that software also runs as administrator, and can thus do much more damage to your system. His blog entry describes how you can run particularly risky software, like Internet Explorer or Outlook, as a limited user, while still running other applications as administrator. Seems like a smart thing to do!
The whole reason I’m suddenly reading all this is that he decided to move old blog entries to his new blog, which creates events in his RSS feed which I get in my email. Recently I’ve been subscribing myself to a whole series of blogs through RSS and I’m quite happy with this. RSS feeds are systems to keep you up-to-date on new posts, and for myself I installed it in such a way that the RSS feeds go directly to my email. So I do not have to check out numerous sites - just checking my email keeps me informed of blogs related to Linux, Sysinternals, and social science statistics. In fact, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog and easily stay informed of my posts. If you have problems doing so, ask me, and I’ll help.
November 5th, 2006
Today a new issue of the Journal of Artifical Societies and Social Simulation was published. I am not a huge fan of the journal as it is too much part of the group of social science that is totally converted to using social simulation as method of social research. In particular circumstances computer simulations can be very illuminating for particular issues and it is definitely a very cool tool to use, but it is not the revolution of social science as some presume and it is often far less useful than empirical methods. For this reason, I usually appreciate papers that use similar techniques that are presented at major political science conferences or get published in major political science journal more than those that are really aimed at the relatively small group of researchers already totally into this area. But, nonetheless, usually when there is a new issue of this journal there are a few articles I do want to read, and this issue is no exception. This log entry is mostly for me to remember which ones I wanted to read:
- Luis R. Izquierdo and J. Gary Polhill, Is Your Model Susceptible to Floating-Point Errors? - this is nicely in line with some things I have been reading recently in this book.
- Michael Barber, Philippe Blanchard, Eva Buchinger, Bruno Cessac and Ludwig Streit, Expectation-Driven Interaction: a Model Based on Luhmann’s Contingency Approach - not sure what this is about but it sounds kind of a little bit interesting. Interesting number of authors, by the way. In most natural sciences it is very common to have large numbers of authors but in political science not at all. I think this is a big mistake - working in larger group you can be much more innovative and self-critical than when working by yourself. I, at least, would much prefer such a working team and miss the team-based work I did in various research projects in Leiden.
- Paul Guyot and Shinichi Honiden, Agent-Based Participatory Simulations: Merging Multi-Agent Systems and Role-Playing Games - interesting probably for both it’s relation to my dissertation research (which implements an agent-based model) and my involvement in Cantr, a roleplaying game I have often wondered couldn’t be used for some academic research especially on diffusion of attitudes over social networks (in Cantr I have access to the entire network and everything that is communicated between characters).
- The Spatial Dimension and Social Simulations: A Review of Three Books - interesting since my simulations are very spatial in nature and also some of the econometrics work I am interested in is focused on spatial dimensions.
Contrary to most previous posts, lately I have been thinking very little about computer and programming, but rather about my research. Especially a potential paper I might be writing with a friend on spatial econometrics, building on the work by Jude Hays and Rob Franzese, has drawn my attention lately and got me very excited. No idea yet whether our basic idea will work out well enough to create a publishable paper, though, but I think that should be clear fairly soon.
This post is the first one I write directly into WordPress instead of pmWiki, and I must say, it’s a very irritating process. Links I copy from other sites are copied with format included, thus what is a big font title on the other site is immediately assumed to be a big font title in the middle of my post. Very irritating! Links are added through a dialog screen instead of just a simple syntax like in pmWiki and are all assumed to be ‘open in same window’ unless you select otherwise. Why is the default to drive people away from your site? And it’s difficult to write after a link without extending it - it assumes it’s all part of the link heading. It’s totally like working in MS Word or something - there is a reason I avoid Microsoft software at times!
I’m quite happy with my renewed discovery of last FM - see the list of music here on the right. To have it included on my site is kind of cool. Mostly I’ve been listening to the radio created by the singer-songwriter tag, which has a lot of cool music.
In the area of gadgets, two cool items I just stumbled on are the dancing robot for your iPod and the headphones with glasses with video screens - nice alternative for my reading while walking to work, isn’t it?
November 5th, 2006
About a month ago I started writing a blog in relation to my thoughts on someday develop a new game next to Cantr. Since I did not want to make these ideas public yet, I thought I’d just blog for archival purposes - for myself to keep track of thoughts and links, and for players to read back once the game is up and running. I quickly found myself blogging a lot more than I expected, however, and on subjects varying more and more, albeit all computer / programming related. It feels a bit pointless to blog too much on a password-protected page. Since I used pmWiki as the background tool for the blog, I also implicitly disallowed any comments on posts, never mind things like enabling RSS feeds.
I also decided that it was kind of silly that I had a relatively nice looking blog behind a password-protection, while my own website was starting to look really dated. The design of my old website is already about five years old and I’m bored with it. Besides, since it is written in plain HTML, it is not quite as easy to keep it up-to-date as a wiki or blog style site. And some blogs look really like proper sites. So, I decided to move my old site out of the way, create a new one powered by WordPress, and integrate it with my newly founded blog. You are looking at the result. All the previous entries of my hidden blog have been entered below.
My photo album, for me the most important part of my site, has always been badly integrated with the site itself. WordPress, however, has plugins available to use with Gallery 2. Since my current albums are in Gallery 1, the transition should be relatively easy, and it should be possible to integrate it all nicely into this site. That might take a little while to do, though, so until then you can find my pictures still here.
At the moment of writing I’m also still looking for a nice theme / skin for this site, so be patient and the design should gradually improve …
October 30th, 2006
Just set up this site and the game site using pmWiki, as a very first tiny step towards developing a new game. I also set up a Subversion repository and added some very few lines of code stolen from the Cantr II server code, including a simple function for database access and some basics for exception handling. That’s all there is so far!
I’ve been looking into 3D design software. Maya is very cool software, and I saw a really interesting book on how to use it, but the software is sooo expensive. So I guess I’ll have to stick to Blender, which is impressive, but not quite as friendly and especially just the colors of the interface make it depressing to work with 
.
September 22nd, 2006